The Role of the Unions Part 14: Gifford Hartman to IDN

NB: This posting appeared before the Mac Intosh's reply to Loren Goldner, but it is placed here to allow greater readability. The original title of Gifford's post was the Class line.

Greetings,

Here are my thoughts:

Except for Will's more detailed writings, I've yet to read any accounts on this
listserve of class relations in the U.S. -- or anywhere else for that matter --
that are based on the actual level of activity (or lack thereof) and
consciousness of working class people. There's also been nothing about living
and working conditions anywhere.

Mac Intosh wrote:

"...the lived experience of the working class in the present epoch"

Well, we are living it, so let's have a discussion about how this lived
experience affects our lives. Because I don't think it's possible to come from
outside of the class to proselytize our fellow workers into actions that make
them communists. That was the mistake of Lenin in What is to be done? in 1902
and his leftist followers have repeated his flawed formula for the ensuing 110
years. It's also the approach of religion -- the saints recruiting the sinners
to the promise of everlasting life.

We need to be doing constant formal and informal surveys of fellow workers,
whether they're our co-workers, our neighbors, or other working class people we
encounter in our everyday lives -- be it on the bus, at the market, or in line
at the unemployment or welfare office. An excellent model would be "A Worker's
Inquiry" that Marx suggested in 1880. Another similar approach would be in the
spirit of the IWW's basic program of AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANIZE, which was
effective on the fly since so many Wobblies lived nomadic lives on board ships,
as “timberbeasts” in the woods, or seasonal and migratory agricultural workers
chasing jobs with the harvest [some releveant facts: A 1913 survey of workers in
California showed the casualized nature of labor as the average employment in
lumber camps was 15-30 days, 30 days for the seasonal canning industry and 60
days for mining] and were not only able to circulate IWW literature, but in the
communal living quarters were able to discuss on a variety of topics, as well as
serve as “walking encyclopedias” of comparative knowledge on prevailing wage
rates, working conditions and organizing strategies. We've come full circle and
many of us have precarious, unstable jobs without any benefits. "The Disposable
Worker" was an article in the January 7, 2010 edition of Businessweek that said:

"... 26% of the U.S. workforce had jobs in 2005 that were in one way or another
'nonstandard.' That includes independent contractors, temps, part-timers, and
freelancers. Of those, 73% had no access to a retirement plan from their
employer and 61% had no health insurance from their employer."

That was 6 years ago, so I'm sure that it's well over 30% and rising. As Loren
Goldner pointed out, right now in South Korea at least 60% of the working class
are "casualized." With the attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin, the
U.S. is moving in the same direction as Korea. And this casualization defines my
life: I work 2 to 4 insecure jobs with irregular hours. Some days I work 10
hours, at other times I go half a week without getting any calls for work. My
once-stable part-time decently-paid public sector job went from 15 hours a week
5 years ago, shaving off an hour or two every year, to the point that I'm down
to 8 hours a week, but with 30% of those hours furloughed for the year. Even
though I was hired into a second tier, my position is non-union but the city's
work rules are pretty parallel to those of the mostly union workforce. So
despite being an "at-will" employee who can be fired at any time for any reason,
my boss is hesitant to do so because the tradition of following those union work
rules. Yet my job will end soon, when my hours get cut down to next to nothing.

The last time I had a full-time union job was at a call center (before that term
was used) in the early 1990s organized with ILWU. It was also the last time I
had fully paid healthcare (medical, dental and vision) and we, as the
rank-and-file, controlled the work process on the shop floor. The company had
just purchased a state-of-the-art robo-dialer computer phone system that was
intended to set the pace of work. Using our unionization for cover, we covertly
sabotaged the computer system a couple times a week. We were insubordinate, we
never allowed the boss (as per company policy) to dock our pay during computer
down times, and I remember countless times telling the boss to "fuck off" to his
or her face -- nearly everyone did! The union hated us because they were always
being called by management to attempt to reign us in. But they were piecards who
had to drive from the union offices to our workplace and usually merely slapped
our wrists and never did anything except occasionally telling us to "cool it."
The mediation of the union gave us breathing space to harass management. As much
as I hate work, I left that job begrudgingly. And yes, most unions are cops for
the boss, but ours was absentee and didn't serve that role. Here, I think what
Staughton Lynd says about labor law is instructive and could also be applied to
unions in such situations (simply replace "law" with "union"):

"The best way to think of the law is as a shield, not a sword. The law is not an
especially good way to change things. but it can give you some real protection
as you try to change things in other ways." (from Labor Law for the Rank &
Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law, by Staughton Lynd and
Daniel Gross, PM Press, 2008, p. 15)

Mac Intosh, you're being hyperbolic when you paint unions as "counter-revolutionary"
with an unsubstantiated broad brush. And being ahistorical too, I might add. It
would be like saying the PTA, the Audubon Society and the NFL are
counter-revolutionary. Except for some Trotskyites, who alleges that unions are
revolutionary anyway? Couldn't the cross-class alliances in your neighborhood
school's PTA be said to be counter-revolutionary by the same logic? If I was
presently in a union, the boss at the aforementioned public sector job couldn't
cut my hours. Anyway, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics
study, private sector unionization in the U.S. went down to 6.9%; overall
unionization went down to 11.9% That means nearly 9 out of 10 workers aren't
even in unions. In the public sector, it's 36.2%, but there are 5 times as many
in the private sector as in the public. But race plays an important role in all
this, as "black workers were more likely to be union members" than whites,
Asians or Hispanics (United States Department of Labor). In places
like New York and California blacks are most likely to be public sector workers
in numbers disproportionately to their presence in the general population, so
the 1970s attacks on the mythical black welfare mom driving a Cadillac has
transformed with the times into attacks on black civil servants with "Cadillac"
health benefits -- and hence the vengeance with which the Tea Party types openly
attack the lucrative benefits of the "greedy" workers in the public sector.
Despite the denials of these reactionaries, it's only slightly-veiled
anti-working class racism. It does attract the negative solidarity of working
class whites, who sans benefits and job security themselves, demand that no one
else have them either. This must be openly confronted.

And despite being agreement with most of the left communists theorizing of many
of you, I am disturbed by the complete lack of any evidence of any kind of
practice. I mean, what do you do when you're not fine tuning your texts on the
collective worker, value theory and decadence? Please don't let me misrepresent
you -- by posting at least a brief account of some kind of activity based on
interaction with other working class people.

But lacking that I'll come once again to the defense of the tradition of the
I.W.W., with their adherence to class war direct action toward the purpose of
class consciousness. They never had any problem drawing the class line, simply
because they didn't "draw" it as some abstract academic exercise, but instead
cleaved the class line decisively in concrete and unmistakable actions.

Here's how Sergio Bologna defined their practice:

"The IWW succeeded in creating an absolutely original type of agitator: not the
mole digging for decades within the single factory or proletarian neighborhood,
but the type of agitator who swims within the stream of proletarian struggles,
who moves from one end to the other of the enormous American continent and who
rides the seismic wave of the struggle, overcoming national boundaries and
sailing the oceans before organizing conventions to found sister organizations.
The Wobblies' concern with transportation workers and longshoremen, their
constant determination to strike at capital as an international market, their
intuitive understanding of the mobile proletariat - employed today, unemployed
tomorrow - as a virus of social insubordination, as the agent of the "social
wildcat": all these things make the IWW a class organization which anticipated
present-day forms of struggle." (Bologna, Sergio. "Class Composition and the
Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers’ Council Movement,” trans.
Bruno Ramirez, in Telos, #13, Fall 1972, pp. 4-27

Simply imploring "the" workers to draw the class line without historical context
is accepting a static definition of class. Here E. P. Thompson is helpful,
because he wrote that the working class was:

"... present at its own making... [and]... the notion of class entails the
notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency
which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and
anatomize its structure... The relationship must always be embodied in real
people and in a real context... Class is defined by men [and women] as they live
their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition" (Thompson, E.
P., "Preface" to The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage Books, 1966,
p. 9, 11)

I don't think anyone can claim to be a communist without swimming "within the
stream of proletarian struggles" as a full, active participant. This much is
clear: without a fightback based on the self-activity and self-organization of
our class, many of us whose lives are defined by the wage relation are only a
pay check or two away from the conditions of the reserve army of labor, be it
living in a car, in a tent city, at a homeless shelter, or in jail.